Search Results for "cloud"

Podcast: Project Prism – Has Uncle Sam Gone Rogue?

It was hard to escape the big news this week: revelations from The Guardian and The Washington Post about a program of widespread surveillance of online social networks and mobile phone use. The news, both the result of high-level leaks of classified information, has embroiled the Obama Administration in the most serious questions about domestic spying since the Nixon administration. To discuss the week’s events, Paul sat down with Ron Gula, the CEO of Tenable Network Security (and a former NSA security ninja) and Rick Forno, director of the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Graduate Cybersecurity Program and a Junior Affiliate Scholar at the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS).  While neither guest was surprised to read about the government’s monitoring of cell phone activity or data from social networks, the latest reports lay bare the dimensions of the U.S. government’s domestic spying post 9/11, and raise serious […]

Podcast: The Big Truth – Responding To Sophisticated Attacks

If you work at a rank and file corporation in the U.S. or Europe, stories like those about the breach at the defense contractor Qinetiq are terrifying. Here’s a company that’s on the bleeding edge of technology, making autonomous vehicles and other high-tech gadgetry for the U.S. Military. Despite that, it finds itself the hapless victim of a devastating cyber breach that lasts – by all accounts – for months, or years. In the end, the attackers (likely linked to China’s People’s Liberation Army) make off with the company’s intellectual property (likely all of it) and, soon, defense contractors in Mainland China start turning out devices that look eerily similar to the ones Qinetiq makes. Ouch! If a company like Qinetiq can’t stop an attack by advanced persistent threats (APT) – or whatever name you want to use –  what hope do overworked IT admins at rank and file enterprises […]

Update: Serial Server Flaws Expose Critical Infrastructure

A survey conducted by the firm Rapid 7 has found evidence that widespread vulnerabilities and insecure configuration of ubiquitous networking components known as serial port (or “terminal”) servers, may expose a wide range of companies and critical assets – including point of sale terminals, ATMs and industrial control systems – to remote cyber attacks.(*) The vulnerable devices connected hardware like retail point-of-sale systems at a national chain of dry cleaners, providing direct access to employee terminals from which customer payment information could be accessed. Other exposed systems were used to monitor the location of cargo containers, train cargo as well as HVAC and industrial control systems, Rapid7 said. In the Rapid7 survey, over 114,000 unique IPs were identified in a scan using the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), the vast majority manufactured by one company: Digi International. If left unaddressed, the vulnerable devices give remote attackers direct, administrative access to hardware devices […]

Podcast: Switch To IPV6 Demands A Security Re-Think

Editor’s Note: This  interview with Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek was originally recorded on March 29th. You’re probably not aware of it, but a major transformation is taking place on the Internet. We’ve exhausted the approximately 4.3 billion available addresses for IPV4 – Internet Protocol Version 4 – the Internet’s lingua franca. (Roughly 98% of all Internet traffic.)   With billions of new, intelligent devices set to join the global Internet in the next decade, a new addressing scheme was needed. Enter Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPV6), which will create a practically inexhaustible supply of new addresses and some much needed, new security features that can prevent man in the middle attacks, ARP poisoning and a host of other ills. But organizations that have the luxury of waiting to upgrade their networks should do so, says Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek in this exclusive interview with The Security Ledger. From vulnerability scanning to […]